Today is the 20th birthday of our youngest grandchild, Spenser Busk Covert, and we are together with him to celebrate. We don‘t recall ever having been able to celebrate this annual event with Spenser, and now he is a full grown man entering his 21st year!
Just to be clear, he has always received birthday greetings from us, usually on the actual date, we haven’t been ignoring him. The day after the wedding was again a sunny and cool morning in Temecula. The hot air balloons were rising, although the household was a little slower to rouse following yesterday‘s events and last night‘s party celebration with all the drinking and dancing; only a few early risers saw the flights.
Mark again manned the breakfast station, providing a brunch of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, toast and bagels for the crowd. Breakfast cereal and fruit were also available as well as orange juice or screw drivers for the ambitious! Ed & Jake‘s birth mother, Cholly Dober and her husband Mike Serviante stopped by and joined us for breakfast as they had early checkout from their hotel. Cholly sat on one of the lounge chairs and promptly dozed off in the sunshine. Mike looked around the BnB, and then visited for a while.
The grandkids, together with Deb, Darcy, Glenda and Jeff decided to drive into Old Towne Temecula for a bit of exploring. Abby stayed back to work on her “tan” and parboil herself in the hot tub. Jake and Audrey did some reading and lounging, Mark began his packing and gathering of all the detritus they had deposited over the week. The crew returned, declaring Old Towne a bit of a bust. It was full of quaint shops crammed with weekend tourists from the big cities, and very little of interest. Next up was clean up in preparation for the evening meal. Spenser had requested Asian food for his birthday dinner, and he wanted it at a restaurant, not Grampa Mark’s take on Asian cuisine, even though Mark was half way through J.Kenji Lopez-Alt’s new 500 page tome- The Wok. Ed had made reservations for 16 people at the nearest P.F. Chang restaurant. Our crew of 12 plus Meg and Ed, and Meg’s mom and stepfather, Sally and Tom Kinnear. Everyone ordered off the menu, and due to the size crowd and length of the table, all the meals won’t be listed. However, at our end of the table we could spot beef fried riced, broccoli beef with steamed rice, kung pao shrimp with steamed rice, some steamed pork dumplings and crab Rangoon wontons. The food was excellent and filling, though it pretty much destroyed the dieting that had been going on for the weeks leading up to the wedding.
We adjourned back to the air BnB for a group singing of Happy Birthday, and a chocolate cake and chocolate mint ice cream in honor of the birthday boy! Meg and Ed headed off to their resting place (for some reason, they were tired!), our crew sat around by the pool and fire pit roasting s’mores, and chatting and drinking. Mark again was a short hitter, retiring around 11:30. Deb and the others stayed up and completed their packing for the big departure tomorrow.
